SHSU Implements SpamWatch to Combat Spamming

Due to the recent amounts of spam sent from SHSU accounts, IT@Sam will soon implement SpamWatch.

This program is a new initiative by Sam Houston State University to combat compromised e-mail accounts due to phishing scams.

Phishing scams are an attempt to acquire access to your personal data either through e-mail or popups. Many people every year fall victim to phishing scams and if it happens to you, your account may be used to send out numerous e-mails to various people across the country.

This is where SpamWatch comes in. SpamWatch will look for SHSU e-mail accounts that send e-mails to an excessive number of external (non-SHSU) recipients. Should a particular account exceed the limit for the last 24 hours, it will be temporarily disabled. We currently have the limit set to 1000 external recipients, but that number may change as we monitor the performance of the system and seek the optimal number to catch the majority of spam from our system.

While this is somewhat of an inconvenience, it is necessary to temporarily suspend sending access to end the spamming event. The goal of IT@Sam is to reduce the number of e-mail domains that blacklist SHSU mail servers due to these spamming events.

Should you lose your sending privileges, any subsequent e-mails that are sent will result in an Undeliverable response (aka NDR). Please note that we put a custom message that will help identify the reason for this Undeliverable response (circled in red in the picture below).

As a reminder, if you have to send an e-mail to more than 250 recipeints at Sam Houston State University, please submit a work order to have a mass mail created. Instructions can be found on the SHSU technology tutorials page.